Jim Goar, at Criticism: "During a Vancouver lecture, [Jack] Spicer asserted that W. B. Yeats was the first poet since William Blake who made a distinction between poetry that was coming from inside the poet and poetry that was coming from outside the poet."
Bookforum: "[For Spicer], the poet’s work is reduced to an almost mechanical act of listening to and receiving what Spicer called the Outside—a field of forces that invade rather than inspire, and before which the poet is little more than a secretary taking dictation." (though Spicer himself, in lecture, says that the poet also has the role of [self-]censoring: "because there will be all sorts of things coming from
your mind, from the depths of your mind, from things that you want, which will foul up the poem")
this, for Goar, demonstrates that, for Spicer, poetry is not simply "a transcription of a message from the 'Outside,'" but rather is inevitably "formed through a struggle between the poet’s wants and desires and the 'Outside’s' transmitted message."
the poet is not just a "radio" but also a "counterpunching radio" (both figures in "Sporting Life")
Goar: " Instead of being a passive vessel, a radio that plays whatever is broadcast into it, the poet is a radio that responds to, and that fights with, an opponent [...] the 'Outside' is here depicted as the necessary adversary"